Need some help. I’m gathering information for an essay on Bond and the historical real facts that lead up to it’s creation by Fleming.
I’ve seen some documentaries about Fleming’s work during WW2, Dusko Popov, etc. Like https://dai.ly/x1dagsy.
Altough I’m missing one that I thought I had. It mentioned the possible origin for the character of Moneypenny. I remembered they talked about a woman that worked with/for Fleming and was a courier of some sort. I remember it even showed a picture of her next to a motorcicle. I have a vague notion that she died and Fleming was very sad about it.
Must be Muriel Wright; she got a job as motorcycle dispatch rider for the Admiralty. You find a picture of her - though not with her motorcycle - and some of her backstory in Ben Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only* - Ian Fleming and James Bond.
It’s one of the lesser known episodes in Fleming’s life, for good reason. Fleming had a number of deficiencies character-wise. One of the worst was that he was just an a**hole with regards to the ladies: he treated them as disposable and Mu Wright probably got the worst of it during their time, coming when he snapped his fingers, staying away when he was with other women. It’s fair to say Fleming might have enormously profited if her brother actually had met him that day he payed him a call with a horse whip. Alas, the forewarned couple went on a trip to Brighton…
Wright was addicted to him, to the point she was considered his ‘slave’. And then in 1944 she died in an air raid. And like these cases often go, Fleming mourned her death bitterly. Only it didn’t help.
The name rang a bell!